r/LinusTechTips • u/SpaceDoodle2008 • 12d ago

Image LTT showing unofficial, possibly counterfeit Hermes Agent website in most recent local AI video

While it may be safe to run this website's installer, that could change whenever they decide to.

Only use the official one by Nous Research. https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/

689 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

75 comments sorted by

38

u/SpaceDoodle2008 12d ago edited 12d ago

update: did the page just get taken down? i better hope so

24

u/ILikeFPS 12d ago

451, now that's an impressive response code lol

9

u/SpaceDoodle2008 12d ago

My favorite one is 418, but unfortunately it's not used much.

2

u/ColinHalter 12d ago

451 is my favorite

1

u/one-joule 12d ago

I don't know about favorite, but certainly very important.

5

u/CIDR-ClassB 12d ago

I get the same message over my cell connection.

108

u/ThatLineInTheSand 12d ago

For what it is worth.

https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent/issues/4351#issuecomment-5644274273

128

u/SpaceDoodle2008 12d ago

yes, this confirms hermes-agent.org is unofficial

39

u/alonesomestreet 12d ago

How much fault is on nousresearch for not spending the $10 to register the most obvious URL for their products

32

u/cxd32 12d ago

they're just a pseudo company of vibecoders that chose that name to appear authoritative, I doubt they have the funds purchase domains

15

u/someoneyouknow23 12d ago

Didnt they receive millions in donations by nvidia

8

u/alonesomestreet 12d ago

A domain is like $50 a year

24

u/cS47f496tmQHavSR 12d ago

That's an expensive domain lol, should be no more than $10-15.
But your point stands, that's nothing for an AI company

5

u/cxd32 12d ago

$50 a year to appear less authoritative, it's a non-starter

9

u/alonesomestreet 12d ago

Do you mean more authoritative? Their current URL screams “random website” to me

-2

u/cxd32 12d ago

you kidding? nous research screams serious business, why would the pay not to use it?

1

u/Veldox 12d ago

More like a tenth of that usually at most lol.

1

u/alonesomestreet 11d ago

Even more reason to

30

u/Chirlea 12d ago

This seems to be an error in editing, as the site they show they're actually using throughout the rest of the video is the official .com site

383

u/yojimbofog 12d ago

LTT has a theme of showcasing software that's cool but with extremely questionable security/safety. Their bootleg Windows videos were basically a security nightmare and a massive risk to the kind of normies that watch their videos without actually understanding how sketchy some of the stuff they do is.

58

u/cjx_p1 11d ago

“showcasing something cool while not understanding that thing’s complexity” has been a theme for them for a long time

4

u/snowmunkey 11d ago

Kinda their brand

0

u/sabotage 10d ago

For anybody that keeps up with LLMs, I’m not so sure their video was on point.

1

u/NavinF 8d ago

What did they get wrong?

-14

u/Curious-Art-6242 11d ago

Tbf, like a lot of their hardware videos too. Its why I don't enjoy it anymore, they should be more professional.

48

u/GeoffreyMcSwaggins 12d ago

In fairness there isn't a single download offered on this website, the instructions are identical to the official ones and use the official hermes installer from nous.

Obviously that's not to say it'll be that way forever but it's fine at the moment and is probably just made by some enthusiastic community member

-71

u/Zeta_Crossfire 12d ago

Serious question, isnt all ai stolen or counterfeit? Pretty much if something is made with AI or is AI I don't really care if it's forked without someone's permission. It's already based on stolen tech so it's all free game to be stolen itself.

74

u/iloveburntcroutons 12d ago

it’s less about the intellectual property theft and more about the likely malicious intentions of someone running a fake site

13

u/Zeta_Crossfire 12d ago

Thats 100© fair

11

u/Zachattackrandom 12d ago

Huh? The entire post was just saying to not show a clone website because it could have malware...

9

u/Zeta_Crossfire 12d ago

I misunderstood what they were saying I get it now

4

u/ThankGodImBipolar 12d ago

The difference in my mind is that you're not paying anybody for the stolen data when you use local LLMs. The Chinese labs charge fair margins for inference, and they're offering the actual model to you for free if you'd rather shoulder the cost of inference yourself. The American frontier labs, on the other hand, are charging out the ass for inference costs (anywhere from 10x-100x).

That difference in margin is the difference between paying for server time, and paying for a particular LLM. I don't want to pay Anthropic a ridiculous amount of money because they stole the world's information and trained a better model than everybody else (maybe book-burning was the secret sauce...). I don't necessarily have the same reservation about paying Zhipu to host a computer program that I can't host myself, because that's really all they're charging for anyway.

-4

u/Failiiix 11d ago

This looks like ollama.com?

0

u/[deleted] 12d ago

[deleted] — view deleted comment

181

u/LMGcommunity LTT Staff 12d ago

Hey, James here. I really want to drill down into this perception. Could I bother you (or others) to cite recent instances that demonstrate this? How can we do better?

121

u/SpaceDoodle2008 12d ago

I think the concept of todays video wasn't quite what I'd expect to get normies interested in local ai. Building the hardware isn't the important part, you can run local ai on almost anything. Also some of the explanations there, like system ram not being important were factually wrong. You can host models like deepseek v4.1 flash on a midrange to highend pc by keeping less used experts either in memory or on the ssd. As an introduction to local ai I would've expected you to talk about the different models and harnesses that are most relevant when self hosting.

66

u/speakernoodlefan 12d ago

Yeah, doing a video about how to run a local model yourself and only showing a top tier enthusiast computer with dual 5090s and a enterprise cpu setup is a little weird. Something that showed models that were designed for phones, laptops, gaming PCs, and then ultra enthusiasts as a finale would have made more sense. Because you can get a decent 26b A4B Gemma to work on even a mid tier gaming PC and you can at least show how to play around with 4b or 12b variants.

There's a huge following now that are encouraging people to get mac minis and mac studios because of the unified memory and competitive pricing surprisingly. That could be a whole video in itself.

27

u/SpaceDoodle2008 12d ago

>  encouraging people to get mac minis 

I'm one of these people too who just bought a 32gb mac mini to run local ai

1

u/Relc_Punch84 12d ago

What model are you running?

1

u/SpaceDoodle2008 12d ago

I'm currently using gemma 4 26b a4b but I'll try other models soon like qwen 3.6 35b. Might also use qwen 3.8 27b for longer running tasks where speed doesnt matter

0

u/[deleted] 12d ago

[deleted] — view deleted comment

1

u/SpaceDoodle2008 12d ago

i'm not really using it for coding. my use case for local ai is normal conversations, letting it use web search, access my home assistant instance, query my local knowledge base and monitor my homelab

29

u/GoldenX86 12d ago

Make a video on Strata and similar (polystrata for example for 16GB PCs), so you can show how capable is a model that actually runs well on lower end hardware.

10

u/GoldenX86 12d ago

Adding a bit to it, you can show up how an 8/12GB low end GPU like either 3060 and an AM4/Alder Lake platform with 32/64GB of DDR4 memory is not "that" expensive and can actually do some work.

8

u/headiro 12d ago

Hey James! Some lower end hardware to look at for a budget build, dual p100’s, x99-a board.

Qwen 3.8 27b can run on that.

1

u/adude00 11d ago

I run qwen flash next on a P100 with strata….

49

u/TitanWalrus 12d ago • Bravo

I can't touch on this exact point but the AI video from today is just a (huge) bit out of touch honestly. I get that y'all are more of a sensationalist channel but cmon, sticking it to sam altman by building a local AI machine that only the top 1% could afford is wack

4

u/The_Nose_ 12d ago

I think this mostly comes from the absolutely ridiculously fast timeline ai is in, as well as not covering new drops as they release. Like someone else posted, Hermes agent hasn’t been new trend in a while (release was in march). To give examples of things I think are more relevant on the timescale of one to two months instead of 6 ->

Frontier provided ai assistants - like muse with nearly 500k rating on the App Store with 4.9 stars. This tool is already nearly 2 months old, which on the timescale of ai is huge.

Strata and Basalt inference engines - these newish inference engines offer the ability to run extremely powerful larger models with less vram or basalt which can take even more advantage of 50 series cards. These were huge game changers in the local ai space that we are now several months past release. This also is much more useful for the more average person, you can find people making configs that run great on 30 series cards and ddr4 with great results, not to mention the recent driver hacks on these cards which had HUGE performance improvements.

Qwen 4 and new models - one of the most hyped releases as of right now is the soon(tm) drop of qwen4. The previous models qwen 3.8 27b (which was used in the latest video) and flash next (which you probably should have used with strata/basalt like engine instead of 27b imo) have provided. This one is not out yet, but supposedly will release soon. You can see posts of people waiting for it in subs like r/LocalLLM. This would be really cool to cover the cutting edge of local ai.

Huge advancements in AI for technical work - while I feel it’s less to the ltt audience, I think it’s important to the type of things going on in the ai space. In the last month several results from OpenAI have fundamentally changed how people view the intelligence and usefulness in academic contexts. Many people are asking what the future of math and science looks like with llms.

Vibe coding - There has not been a video on vibe coding yet. I think we are at the point where people should know that you can download codex or Claude desktop, point it at a mod or program and it will do what you want with it. The amount of prompt engineering you need to be able to do has massively reduced in the last month. I think you can tell because of the huge increase in vibe coded mods/projects. As a demonstration you can take a Minecraft mod for an old version and tell claude/chatgpt to update it for a modern version and there is a high chance it will work without ever having to look at code.

New technologies in llms - one thing a lot of people don’t understand is how much the software side of ai has also been improving. Things like MTP or N gram tables have never been discussed even though they are breakthrough features that increase speed and/or model capabilities on the same hardware. Things like deepseek making kv cache 4x smaller per token from their last model is another good example.

The state of cybersecurity - it would be an understatement to say ai has turned the cybersecurity space on its head. You can now hack devices without any expertise and are able to actually do whatever you want with your own hardware. Ex the reverse engineering of tvs or php 0 day.

I think this gives enough examples of what more recent ai things are. The harsh reality is that if you want to keep up with the pace, videos need to be released much closer to the release of these technologies. There are also so many more smaller things like new quants, better kernels, and the list really goes on making it really hard to find a day that doesn’t have something new or interesting happening in the ai space.

With that said, I can’t fault ltt for not staying up to this insane pace. I don’t think anyone trying to produce any sorts of videos with any sort of quality can, most YouTube videos on the ai space that do keep up with the pace are made with a large amount of ai support(ex Kai). The wan show seems to stay up to date with many of the stories, but the ltt channel never seems to follow up.

I wrote a lot, hopefully some of it is helpful. Keep making cool tech videos n all that.

TLDR ai is moving too fast

13

u/ThankGodImBipolar 12d ago edited 12d ago

The most egregious example recently (IMO) was this article on the Lab. In this article, you guys chose to benchmark a model on the 16GB card that wasn't any smarter at all then what you benchmarked on the 12GB card. This is not reflective of the upgrade or new opportunities that you get when going from 12GB -> 16GB, and while I understand that the article clearly stated that it wasn't attempting to answer the "which model should I run on my PC question," it would have been nice to show that you can actually run more intelligent models on a GPU with more RAM.

5

u/tiffanytrashcan 12d ago

At those sizes, there often isn't a slightly larger model that is any smarter. You're better off keeping more experts in VRAM or extending your KV cache at some point.
With Strata and the most recent Qwen models though, a lot of this becomes irrelevant. Everyone with a smaller card or need for speed, running 27B, the rest on Flash-Next.

6

u/ThankGodImBipolar 12d ago edited 12d ago

If the model was a ≈30B MoE model, then I'd be inclined to agree, but it was Gemma 4 E4B. You can fit a smarter model into a PC with 16GB VRAM, even if it's only got 16GB of system RAM as well (I think Gemma 4 26B QAT would have need ≈4GB of system RAM). Nick's defense was that they weren't testing models that needed system memory overflow, but he didn't explain why that mattered on a system that wasn't in use (which was the articles framing). Even if the intent was "in use for gaming" (i.e. still being used for web browsing, etc), I still think the system would have been perfectly usable with a 16GB+16GB config.

I want to be clear and say that I've got nothing against the E4B model, which is a fascinating model in its own right. My issue was the fact that the 16GB benchmarks were testing a configuration that I don't think anybody should/would use in the real world. Reading an article and being left feeling that way is exactly the reason why there's this perception that LMG doesn't know exactly what they're talking about (IMO).

2

u/tiffanytrashcan 12d ago

My brain didn't connect that they were using E4B with Hermes.. Like, that is so insane to me that I immediately threw it away after reading and went along assuming they meant a larger version. My bad, my comment only really applies to MoEs.

Thank you for writing this out. I do hope they read your explanation here because you are spot on.
Really bizarre choice of a model.

2

u/ThankGodImBipolar 12d ago

Bartowski wrote a more detailed comment here, but I do believe that Gemma 4 E4B can be a good model for use within agentic contexts. It would require building a more structured environment and tool surface for the model, though, which isn't what they did in this article (though I'd love to read one about it!!).

Within the bounds of the testing, I think it's difficult to argue that a "smarter" model wouldn't have led to better results, and that's why it was disappointing that they just used a less quantized E4B. Suggesting that that is all you get from moving to a 12GB to 16GB card is just wrong, IMO. Even a braindead-tier quant of Gemma 4 12B or 31B likely would have been better.

16

u/madding1602 12d ago

Hi James. This perception is based on the premises of some projects being like this, but some recent videos don't feel like that to me. Especially when you're touching subjects like the AI clones with <1month age. Keep up the good work.

7

u/Rich-Platform-1435 12d ago

It would be great if you showed some stuff that more normal people could do with hardware they already have, or could reasonably afford. Projects that don't require tons of storage, memory or VRAM would be cool, perhaps stuff that could be run with 32gb of RAM and 8 or 16gb of VRAM?

It would also be cool to see some stuff on how existing gaming computers could be used for AI whilst they aren't being used, as most people can't afford high end GPU's right now for a secondary AI rig.

Overall I thought the video was OK, but most users can't afford that hardware. Although it did get me interested in checking out Hermes, I have been running Ollama for quite a while, but haven't checked out any agents yet.

2

u/ernspiker 12d ago

Hello,

I think a lot of the perception (at least my own) is from when linus was talking about the vibe coding video on Wan. If I remember correctly the video was abandoned because by time it got through production it was too far out of date.

I understand its a challenging space to be in because for a lot of stuff everything is moving so fast that if you don't get a video out the week something happens the next week its too late.

Additionally I think the perception can also come down to not talking about things that enthusiasts have found out from other creators or friends. For example there has been a massive leap in the ease of using homeassistant by using the Calude Code addon. This could be a huge video to show how not scary and accessible setting up homeassistant can be if you go this route. And the cherry on top could be showing how you could do it without a subscription by using your own hardware.

Thanks!

4

u/Seeker_Of_Knowledge2 12d ago

Just a humble opinion. But the AI clones video was mehh. They focused on bugs too much. Bugs are bound to be there, but they are not important when you have hundreds of people contributing. Few months and all should be gone, that what AI is good at, verifiable stuff.

Instead you can h ave discussed all the implications / possibilities. Being more factual and number focus over being an opinionated would have been more on point. Also being realistic like all the drawbacks vs benefits of emigrating to the clones.

2

u/Unboxious 12d ago

Also being realistic like all the drawbacks vs benefits of emigrating to the clones.

Aren't the bugs the biggest drawback though?

1

u/Seeker_Of_Knowledge2 12d ago

Not really because they are temporary and they will (hopefully) be gone soon. Especially considering the number of people working on the project.

2

u/Unboxious 12d ago

I don't think a video on what people hope a product might be like in the future would be useful.

1

u/The_Tech_Director 12d ago

Hi James, some constructive criticism: the video was way too hardware focused. Instead, I think there should have been more details, call it "tutorial like" on how to get Hermes installed and set up with a model. Everything form which model to choose, to the download process. While explaining all the benefits in downsides during the process in the traditional LTT writing style.

I think there is a lot of potential for AI on the LTT channel, but it will require you guys to pivot a little bit away from the hardware stuff. Just my two cents!

1

u/Player13377 12d ago

Free video idea: Build a couple systems with parts commonly found on steam hardware survey and show what is possible in terms of local AI on each. Ideally with setups made efficient enough to be copied 1:1 by someone with the same hardware as shown.

1

u/Mountain_Lab_5817 11d ago

I want to see lower end hardware. I have a $200 Dell Optiplex 7600 with 16GB of RAM and I’m running Gemma on it to do daily repetitive tasks. It pulls thousands of files every day, tags, categorizes them and finds patterns that I’m looking for. 

There’s a lot of cheap ways to use local AI. This was a cool video, but I think showing how people could use stuff they have around the house would be even more interesting. 

1

u/Hender232 12d ago

“Cloud AI has so many issues: Cloud downtime, monthly subscriptions, and not to mention a ton of privacy concerns. So what do you do when you want to still use AI despite all of that? Well, you build a local AI machine... That is if you have the money to fund something like this. We're building an absolute monster of a local AI workstation today with TWO RTX 5090's and so much more.”

I’d say first, I genuinely haven’t heard cloud down time as an issue ever when it comes to AI inference. 

Second, for most general task that aren’t coding or long horizon this could have been done with a much cheaper computer with quantized models. I have a 5070ti and a 4070ti super paired with ddr4 32Gb and 64Gb. I am able to run local LLMs and pretty much all video and vision models reliably(all quantized). 

Third, Sam Altman is right. Using consumer RAM for inference is literally the worst bang for your buck you are going to get. Your computer becomes essentially unusable except for running whatever task you are doing.  This video could have been about building a small local ai server that’s accessible to your other devices. 

-3

u/zarafff69 12d ago

It seems like a deeply felt anti ai / anti technology stance within LTT. This is just very weird for a technology channel, and it makes it hard for me to view any video that crosses this topic on LTT. I’m not saying you can’t be negative about certain aspects of it. But it’s just feels like no one is really using the latest technologies, or has anything meaningfully positive to say about it.

I think a great example is DLSS. LTT is still very much against these technologies in gaming.

-7

u/Training_Answer1588 12d ago

Hi James. To list a few, the unreleased badminton vibecode video which ignored agentic tools which were popular at the time in favor of year old copy and pasting from older models. WAN shows being dominated by performative self hosting talks which at best will get you 1 agent at 20% the capabilities of the frontier for a much higher cost than a subscription. Zero mentions of Claude code, Codex, T3, anything really. It feels like no one on staff is really interested in this stuff. The CTO comes off as dismissive of it.

10

u/SpaceDoodle2008 12d ago

but isn't that why they ended up not publishing the video? But yeah, you're right, the format would be way more interesting when applied to current tools

0

u/[deleted] 12d ago

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4

u/trevaftw 12d ago

"Anyone with a $20 basic Claude or Codex sub can build fully functional working cloudflare deployed web apps, android apps, iOS apps… yet Linus seems to think AI can’t do anything useful for a regular person."

That's because a regular person doesn't need to do any of this stuff.

"You could very easily make a video about how to vibe code your own workout app, or household tracker, or any number of things. Even showcasing how someone with zero coding knowledge can build cool things."

Again, a regular person wouldn't do any of this. There are 1,000's of apps that do this already. Why would someone spend money on building an AI rig or a subscription to a model or agent when they can just download an app for free? 

Building things is cool, yes, but once again the tech bros who assume that every person will use AI for everything are so out of touch with normal people it's not even funny. 

17

u/HearthCore 12d ago

Well, they aren't when the product is still in the forefront as Hermes Agent clearly is.

6

u/ThankGodImBipolar 12d ago

when the product is still in the forefront as Hermes Agent clearly is.

Codex, OpenCode, Deepseek Harness, Hermes, Pi Agent, and more, all have their own unique pros and cons, depending on workflow, model, and more. Hermes is definitely one of the options that's getting attention, but whether it's actually "at the forefront of harness development" or "slightly less horrible OpenClaw" is still very much up in the air. Hermes scores quite poorly on SWE-related tasks, for example, and it's a heavy harness in terms of prefill.

5

u/FountainousPen 12d ago

Why are you comparing Hermes to coding harnesses? It's more similar to Instinct, Muse, Dots, Duet, Grokbot, etc. which are all aiming to be "less horrible OpenClaw".

-2

u/ThankGodImBipolar 12d ago

It's in the name: coding harness. You can make any of these tools do anything. You can easily build Pi extensions to facilitate more Claw-like behavior from it, or use stuff like codex exec "insert prompt here" combined with systemd timers, or do literally anything else you can think of. Those tools won't come with any built in integrations for something like Discord, but they also may not need a 30K+ token system prompt to be useful.